I really don’t see the point of reading in straight lines. We don’t think like that and we don’t live like that. Our mental processes are closer to a maze than a motorway, every turning yields another turning, not symmetrical, not obvious. Not chaos either. A sophisticated mathematical equation made harder to unravel because X and Y have different values on different days.

Jeanette Winterson, Oranges are not the only fruit.

In relation to men and women, our most basic stereotypical expectation is simply that they will be different rather than the same. We actively look for differences, and seek out resources which discuss them. Faced with claims like BT’s ‘men stand up to make phone calls whereas women sit down’, our first reaction is more likely to be ‘how interesting’ than ‘what nosense’ or ‘who cares?’ We are much less attentive to, and less interested in hearing about, similarities between men and women. And this has consequences, not only for our everyday conversations, but also for what goes on in the supposedly more objective realm of science.

Most rearch studies investigating the behaviour of men and women are designed around the question: ‘is there a difference?’-and the presumption is usually that there will be. If a study finds a significant difference between male and fenale subjects(in other words, a result which statistical tests show could not have been produced by chance), that is considered to be a ‘positive’ finding, and has a good chance of being published in a scientific journal. A study which finds no significant differences is less likely to be published. This means that some negative findings are never even submitted for publication. It also means that if a study has examined a large number of variables and found positive results for only one or two of them, it will be the least typical, positive findings which the researchers emphasize.

The preference for positive findings is on one level understable. A report which says, in essence, ‘we looked for something and didn’t find it’ does not make for compelling reading. But if the research was competently designed and carried out, whatever it finds must surely count as knowledge. ‘Men and women did not perform any differently on task X’ is no less a fact than ‘men and women performed significantly differently on task X’. If findings that confirm male-female differences get published more often than findings that disconfirm those differences, the resulting research literature will systematically distort the picture.

Deborah Cameron, “The Myth of Mars and Venus”.

Come to me in the silence of the night;
Come in the speaking silence of a dream;
Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as
bright
As sunlight on a stream;
Come back in tears,
O memory, hope, love of finished years,

O dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter
sweet,
Whose wakening should have been in
Paradise,
Where souls brimfull of love abide and meet;
Where thirsting longing eyes
Watch the slow door
That opening, letting in, lets out no more.

Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live
My very life again though cold in death:
Come back to me in dreams, that I may give
Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:
Speak low, lean low,
As long ago, my love, how long ago.

Christina Rossetti.

(…)

‘We live in a age when private life is being destroyed’, Milan Kundera said in 1985. ‘The police destroy it in communist countries, journalists threaten it in democratic countries, and little by little the people themselves lose their taste for private life and their sense of it. Without secrecy, nothing is possible-not love, not friendship.’

Some of technology’s most furious political and sociological critics focus on the expansion of the work week and the virtual workplace-now everywhere and inescapable, fastened to your belt or pinned to your ear. A decade before they were fully wired, Americans passed the Japanese to become the most overworked workforce in the developed world. Now devices like the BlackBerry chain even managers and high-salaried professionals to a twenty-four-hour clock that figures to burn them out more rapidly than nineteenth-century wage slaves. Wired America doesn’t rest, and who benefits from that? Long before the computer was a twinkle in Thomas Watson‘s eye, John E. Edgerton, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, said something(circa 1925) that enemies of the wired workplace love to note and quote: ‘The emphasis should be put on work-more work and better work. Nothing breeds radicalism more than leisure.’

Of all the artists and thinkers who’ve rejected the cyber-revolution, perhaps the most emphatic was the late American poet, publisher, and photographer Jonathan Williams, who divided his distinctly original life between the North Carolina mountains and the Yorkshire Dales. ‘I have a feeling about the Internet,’ Williams wrote. ‘I think it’s the younger sister of the Gordon Medusa. If you look more than about twice you’re going to get turned into stone or something much worse, more unpleasant.’

For the last word, it seems appropriate to return to those solemn voices from the recent past, from the Maine silence where this meditation began. Marguerite Yourcenar offers her prophercy in the words of the Roman emperor Hadiran(AD 76-138): ‘I doubt if all the philosophy in the world can succeed in suppresing slavery; it will, at most, change the name, I can well imagine forms of servitude worse than our own, because more insidious, whether they transform men into stupid, complacent machines, who believe themselves free just when they are most subjugated, or whether to the exclusion of leisure and pleasures essential to man they develop a passion for work as violent as the passion for war among barbarous races. to such bondage for the human mind and imagination I prefer even our avowed slavery.’ (Memoirs of Hadrian, 1951)

And this is Scott Nearing, from his book Living the Good Life, published in 1970: ‘Machine tools are a novelty, recently introduced into the realm of human experience. There can be no question but the machines have more power than humans. Also there can be no question but that they have watered down or annihilated many of the most ancient, most fascinating and creative human skills, broken up established institutions, pushed masses of “hands” into factories and herded droves of anonymous footloose wanderers from urban slum to urban slum. Only the historian of the future will be able to assess the net effect of the machine age on human character and on man’s joy in being and his will to alive.

Hal Crowter, “One Hundred Fears of Solitude” en Granta, verano 2010.

Someday your face will freeze like that!

What if everyone jumped off a cliff…Would you do it, too?

You’re going to put your eye out with that thing!

Don’t put that in your mouth…you don’t know where it’s been.

Did you flush?

I hope someday you have children just like you.

If I have to get out of this chair!

Don’t eat that, you’ll get worms!

A little soap and water never killed anyone!

You could have been dead in a ditch for all I knew!

Don’t use that tone with me!

You won’t be happy until you break that, will you!

You’d lose your head if it wasn’t attached to your shoulders!

You’d better wipe that smile off your face before I come and do it for you!

What part of the word no don’t you understand?

Why? Because I said so, that’s why?

Now come back downstairs and go back up again without stamping your feet!

I’ve told you a million times, don’t exaggerate!

Go tidy your room-and be ruthless with it!

Your eyes are bigger than your belly!

It’ll end in tears!

Allison Vale and Alison Rattle, Mothers’ Wit.

Dear Pauline,

Your dad and me was sorry to hear about your trouble and we hopes as it is now cleared up. We never did take to George; he has a hasty temper and we think as how you’re better off without him. As regards of money, Pauline, well we only got a few good days at the potato picking so we are a bit short ourselves at the moment, but we enclose a postal order for Adrian, as we know he has a sweet tooth.

If you would put your trust in the Lord, Pauline, you wouldn’t keep having such trouble in life. God only punishes the heathens and the unbelievers. We was shocked last Christmas as to how much smoking and drinking went under your roof. You wasn’t brought up to it, Pauline. Your dad has never touched a drop in his life, nor has he been a slave to nicotine. We are decent God-fearing folk what knows our place and we only wish that you would take after us more before it’s too late.

Uncle Dennis, Auntie Marcia and Cousin Maurice have moved out of the caravan and into a council house. they have got all modern facilities, Auntie Marcia jokes that it is just like Buckingham Palace. Perhaps when you have had the unwelcome baby you will come and see it for yourself.

Anyway Pauline
We are praying for you,
Yours affectionately,
Mam and Dad
P.S. Auntie Marcia asks if you ever found Maurice’s grey sock that disappeared last Christmas. She’s not been able to rest through wondering about it.

………………………….

Dear Mam and Dad,

Sorry about the short delay in replying to your wonderfully comforting letter, but I have only just emerged from a drunken stupor. Adrian was ecstatic to be sent the postal order for 50 pence and rushed straight out to buy me a can of larger. He’s such a thoughtful kid.

Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to come down and inspect Auntie Marcia’s council house, but I fear that I will be quite unable to drag myself away from the endless round of parties that my life now revolves around. You know what us hedonist are like-living for kicks and not going to church.

I fear that a meticulous search has failed to turn up the missing grey sock. I can appreciate Auntie Marcia’s anxiety on this point, so I enclose my last pound note to enable Auntie Marcia to buy a pair and therefore rest in peace.

What you say about George is quite true, but I married him because at that time he laughed a lot. There weren’t a lot of laughs in our cottage in the middle of the potato field were there?

Cordial greetings,
Your Daughter Pauline
And Grandson Adrian

Sue Townsend, The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole.

For the first time in my life I could sort of understand why men of my age go out with younger women.

I never really got it before. Women in their thirties, their bodies are still springy and you can talk to them. They are still young, but they have seen something of life-probably quite a few of the same views that you have seen.

Why would any man trade that kind of equal partneship for someone with a pierced navel whose idea of a hot date is some awful nightclub and half a tab of something pretending to be Ecstasy?

If you can go out with someone who has read the same books as you, who has watched the same television programmes as you, who has loved the same music as you, then why would you want someone whose idea of a soul singer is the guy in Jamiroquai?

But now I got it. Now I could understand the attraction.

Men of my age like younger women because the younger woman has fewer reasons to be bitter.

The younger woman is less likely to have had her heart bashed around by broken homes, divorce lawyers and the sight of children who are missing a parent. The younger woman doesn’t have all those disappointments that women-and men, too, don’t forget the men-in their thirties drag around with them like so much excess luggage.

It was cruel but true. The younger woman is far less likely to have had her life fucked up by some man.

Men in their thirties and forties don’t go out with younger woman for her bouncy body and her pierced tongue. That’s just propaganda. They go out with her so that they can be the one who fucks up her life.

Tony Parsons, Man and Boy.

The talking back started soon after I’d read his book Hawk-Occupation: Skateboarder. I sort of knew what he sounded like then, and some of the things he’d say. To be honest, I sort of knew all the things he’d say when he talked to me, because they came out of his book. (…)

After a while, I started talking to Tony Hawk about other things-about school, Mum, Alicia, whatever, and I found that she had something to say about those things too. His words still came from his book, but the book is about his life, not just skating, so not everything he says is about sacktaps and shove-its. (…)

Not everything Tony Hawk said was that helpful, to tell the truth, but it wasn’t his fault. If there was nothing in the book that was exactly right, then I had to make some of the sentences fit as best I could. And the amazing thing was that, once you made them fit, they always made sense if you thought about what he said hard enough.

Nick Hornby, Slam.

There once a coquette who had a suitor whom she couldn’t get rid of. He took her promises and avowals seriously, and would not leave. He even believed her hints. This annoyed her, because it got in the way of new temporary acquaintances, their presents, flattery, flowers, dinners and so forth.

Finally Yvonne insulted and lied to her suitor Bertrand, and gave him literally nothing-which was a minus compared to the nothing she was giving her other men friends. Still Bertrand would not cease his attentions, because he considered her behaviour normal and feminine, an excess of modesty. She even gave him a lecture, and for once in her life she told the truth. Unaccustomed as he was to the truth, expecting falsehood from a pretty woman, he took her words as turn-abouts, an continue to dance attendance.

Yvonne attempted to poison him by means of arsenic in cups of chocolate at her house, but he recovered and thought this a greater and more charming proof of her fear of losing her virginity with him, though she had already lost her virginity at the age of ten(…)

Patricia Highsmith, Little Tales of Misogyny.

Also I am not writing this for fun, but for several reasons which I will explain. (1) As I started by saying, because I want the entire truth. (2) Because I know of no truthful record of such a connection-one that is written, I mean, with no desire to appeal to a vicious taste in any possible readers; and (3) because I hold the conviction that as centuries go on, and the sexes become more nearly merged on account of their increasing resemblances, I hold the conviction that such connections will to a very large extent cease to be regarded as merely unnatural, and will be understood far better, at least in their intellectual if not in their physical aspect. (Such is already the case in Russia.) I believe that then the psychology of people like myself will be a matter of interest, and I believe it will be recognized that many more people of my type do exist than under the present-day system of hypocrisy is commonly admitted. I am not saying that such personalities, and the connections which result from them, will not be deplored as they are now; but I do believe that their greater prevalence, and the spirit of candour which one hopes will spread with the progress of the world, will lead to their recognition, if only as an inevitable evil. the first step in the direction of such candour must be taken by the general admission of normal but illicit relations, and the facilitation of divorce, or possibly even the reconstruction of the system of marriage. such advance must necessarily come from the more educated and liberal classes. Since ‘unnatural’ means ‘removed from nature’, only the most civilized, because the least natural, class of society can be expected to tolerate such a product of civilization.

Portrait of a marriage, Nigel Nicolson.